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I think one big big aspect, in “use the right tool for the job”, that is often overlooked, is how good you already are wielding said tool. I use Terraform to m
by smoe 6y ago
I think one big big aspect, in “use the right tool for the job”, that is often overlooked, is how good you already are wielding said tool.
I use Terraform to manage the few personal cloud resources I have. It is overkill, but I already learned it on the job so it ended up being quicker than setting stuff up by hand. If not, I wouldn’t have bothered learning it. At least in this context.
Same when building an MVP, I’m not going to pick some shiny tools I have never used before, but tools I know I can get the job done with.
Sure, I do like learning new things and tinker around with them, but it is not always the right time to do so, and the list of things I’d like to get good at, engineering related or not already is long a enough for a lifetime so one needs to prioritize.
- andrewstuart2 6y agoNot only how well do you use the tool, but how useful is it to learn the tool? Once you can use it well, what else can you do with it? I recently saw a video via twitter that mocked using kubernetes for your blog by showing someone making a sandwich with woodworking tools. Overkill, yeah. But if you stretch the metaphor to the way it translates in k8s, if you get good at making a sandwich in 5 minutes with the tools, you're fairly close to also stamping out dressers and end tables in 5 minutes. At the very least you can make them, which you can't say of a bread knife. And once you do it a few times you can do it with incredible speed.